So Close, Yet So Far
True Short Story I liked her since the first time I saw her. Sitting in class, I couldn't keep my eyes off her. She was as unique a girl as I had ever seen - fluent in her positivity and her manners. Months went by, and I never made a move. She could tell I was looking at her, yet never was moved to engage in conversation with me either. Tears flowed in my eyes at night. How could I get her to notice me? Why was she showing no interest in me at all? Her body language was completely turned away from me and cold, far from warm and welcoming. I then got her to notice me, but not in a good way. From what I did, all I realized was her head was down and she was quite probably crying. I mocked her without noticing. I was embarrassed beyond belief and felt truly horrible. I knew immediately I must apologize. Except, I was too much of a coward to apologize to her in person. If she had dislike for me before, it turned to hate now. I messaged her an entire paragraph of how sorry I was. It took her days to reply, and she told it was fine, and not to worry about it. I still felt awful, but a calm sense of relief overcame me. I decided to overcome my fear, apologize to her again and person, and ask her out. I messaged her a week or two after asking if I could talk to her after class. She said, "Sure." What a lie that was. She was the first person to leave the class after it ended the next day and stood me up. I was so disappointed. She could have told me she did not want to talk to me, and I would have been more than okay with it, but she wanted to be a jerk back to me after I was a jerk to her. One morning later, I was called names by students I didn't even know in the hallways. One of them was "asshole" and another was "I hate you!" She might have let something slip or spilled something about me, but I deserved it. Not long afterward, across the room in a different class, she gave me a mean death stare. With how weak I was, mentally and socially, I could not take it any longer. I buried my head in my hands and preceded to cry while the teacher was lecturing. I never saw her reaction, and quite frankly did not care. No hiding at all: every set of eyes in class knew what was happening. Not once I thought of excusing myself to cry in the bathroom. A different morning, something important socially had happened, but I did not know the extent of which. I overheard her saying her dad took her phone away. I didn't learn why. But our teacher dared us to take our phones out and I saw nobody with a phone in that class, so I knew something behind the scenes happened. After class ended, she glanced over at me and stood up. She and her friend had waited for me. Any normal day I would have gotten up and talked to her, but I was so pissed off and angry that I just stared at the ground angrily. After a couple seconds of waiting they both left. I had made such a mistake by not talking to her or seeing what she wanted when deep down I truly wanted to talk with her. Take out one mistake I made of many and there is a different result. In the background, drama in my social life was brewing, and it was taking a toll on my grades, and my mental health. Not too long after, I approached her after class ended. She ignored me, just the same as I did, to the delight of the audience picking up on it and watching me. Different from when she approached me, as to my knowledge, nobody in the rest of class saw that. I felt crushed. Low laughter and whispers came from my classmates. The next week, I overheard a group near me that she was claiming she dumped her boyfriend. Her boyfriend, apparently, was me, as one girl in the group gestured to me when she thought I wasn't looking. Why was she lying about being my boyfriend, dumping me, when we had barely ever talked before? I learned soon after she was modestly mocking me. I was done with taking it. I dished it out the next time we were in class together, acting angry and slamming things. Out of the corner of her eye she looked hurt, but I didn't care. She was not going to have the upper hand over me, to use my name and say whatever she wanted to about me. In a different class, the teacher had compared something in history to "a girlfriend who doesn't talk to her boyfriend," to the "oooh!" of some of the class as it was a low shot at her. I think she was choking up, but I wasn't certain, and I wasn't going to go over to the other side of the class to comfort her or talk to her, and stayed as far away from her as possible. I didn't go to school for two weeks after that. I was held out for mental health, and my mental health continued to deteriorate. I woke up one day to overhearing my mom on a phone call saying that "she's interested in him too," which could have been her talking to the girl's parents. Also, later, one day, at my house, while I was lying down, I felt something touch and brush my eyebrow affectionately. I think it was her, somehow my parents had let her in, but again I never talked to her. I think she felt rejected, as I'm pretty sure that wasn't her only effort to try to talk to me while I was outside of school. My parents, especially my dad, had dropped subtle hints about her. But I never talked to her afterward, out of cowardice and fear. It has been months since, and there hasn't been a day that passes when I don't think of her. Most likely, she wanted to be together with me and had the same feelings, but I was there to mess things up, as always. Being together with her was always so close, yet so far.